Kevin Marks Anderson (sorry, it's been a long old week) has a right old go at how bad some journalists are over on Strange Attractor in a piece titled Blogging is like sex:
"The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can't fake it. You can't fake passion. You can't fake wanting to engage with the public. If you do, it will ultimately be an unsatisfying experience for both the blogger and their readers. Sure, for a while, the self-confident writer might sit back after crafting a lovely piece of prose and have some post-creative puffery, patting themselves on the back for their performance. But soon, they'll find their blog is a very lonely place."
And in all of those things, he's right. But what he doesn't explore, or even suggest, is that these things can be taught - or, at the very least, learned. If there's one thing that this job has taught me, it is that it's harder to teach many journalists to be good bloggers than it is a random member of the public. They have too much to unlearn first, too many long-established mindsets to let go of.
But it can be done. And it can be done with great success. And sometimes, once the light goes on, journalists will throw themselves into blogging with all their resources, skills and, crucially, available time. And the results can be pretty damn cool. Good journalists care about their audience. Good journalists talk to their audience. Once they see how blogs fit into that, then they really get the idea.
I'm rather warmer to the idea that every journalist should have a blog than Kevin is. Journalism is, in the end, about providing information to an audience. And if you don't care about an audience enough to want to interact with them, not only shouldn't you be blogging, you shouldn't be in journalism at all.
June 8, 2007 7:53 PM | Reply
I didn't write that, Kevin Anderson did - he's the Blogs Editor at the Guardian.
June 8, 2007 8:21 PM | Reply
Ah, yes, of course. Sorry about that. It's been a long week, and my brain was randomly mixing and matching Kevins and their surnames…
June 10, 2007 10:58 PM | Reply
"The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can't fake it..."
Oh dear. I think someone needs to have a quiet word. :)
June 11, 2007 4:26 PM | Reply
Adam,
To clarify from my post, yes, people can be trained, but I was returning to a theme that I've written about before and usually abbreviate as 'interactivity trumps celebrity'. In the age of mass media, brand and name recognition were the focus, but in the age of social media, engagement and interaction are the currency. Most news and media organisations miss this point because they haven't really adapted to social media, apart from the odd acquisition. Brand, name recognition, star power still dominate.
When news organisations are choosing members of staff to blog and to train how to blog, they need to look not only to their most recognisable names but also to members of staff who are open to engagement. To be honest, if they aren't willing to join the converstion, I'm not sure what any amount of training will do.
June 11, 2007 5:17 PM | Reply
Kevin,
I suspect that star power is less of a factor within the trade media - certainly the closest thing we have to a star here is Tony "NHS IT scandals" Collins.
But it feels like we're approaching the whole blogging thing from a very different angle from you guys. On the whole, it's "if you want to blog, we shall make that possible for you", rather than "you are our chosen blogger". So, inherently, we're allowing the people with at least some passion to self-select themselves.
Oddly, though, its often the people who were most resistant to the idea that come to be its greatest evangelists. Your paper even covered one of them in some detail.